Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

263 Pages·2005·12.77 MB·English

by  Linda M.G. Zerilli

PEMINISM AND THE
ABYSS OF FREEDOM
LINDA M G
ZERILLI
'/'he Un iv ers it y of Chic ago Press I Chic ago and London
LINDA ZERILU is professor of political science at Northwestern
University. She is the author of Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos
it1 Rousseau, Burke, and Mill.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2005by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2005
Printed in the United States of America
14 131 21 1 100 90 8 07 06 05 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 0-226-981(3clo3th-)9
ISBN: 0-226-9813(4pa-pe7r )
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zerilli, Linda M. G. (Linda Marie-Gelsomina), 1956-
Feminism and the abyss of freedom I Linda M. G. Zerilli.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-981(3ha3rd-c9ov er: alk. paper)­
ISBN 0-226-9813(4pb-k7. : alk. paper)
1.F eminism. 2.F eminist theory. I. Title.
HQ1154.Z43250 05
305.42'01-dc22
2004028618
8 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require­
ments of the American National Standard for Information Sciences­
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992.
FOR GREGOR
We start something. We weave our strand into
a network of relations. What comes of it we
never know. We've all been taught to say: Lord
forgive them, for they know not what they do.
That is true of all action. Quite simply and
concretely true, because one cannot know.
That is what is meant by a venture.
-HANNAH ARENDT
CONTENTS
l11d.1n� ix
i\1 k nowledgments xiii
INIRODUCTION
Why 1:eminism and Freedom Both Begin with the Letter F 1
I 1rt·dom as a Social Question
l·1t·nlom as a Subject Question
hl•t•Jom as a World Question
h·minism's "Lost Treasure"
CHAPTER ONE
Feminists Know Not What They Do: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
.md the Limits of Epistemology 33
Theory-The Craving for Generality?
A Wittgensteinian Reading of the Feminist Foundations Debate
I >oing Gender, Following a Rule
Radical Imagination and Figures of the Newly Thinkable
Toward a Freedom-Centered Feminist Theory
CHAPTER TWO
Feminists Are Beginners: Monique Wittig's Les gumlleres
and the "Problem of the New" 67
The Limits of Doubt
Language as a "War Machine"
Renversement
No-More and Not-Yet
Elles-A Fantastic Universal
CHAPTER THREE
Feminists Make Promises: The Milan Collective's Sexual Difference
and the Project of World-Building 93
Tearing Up the Social Contract
The Desire for Reparation
The Problem with Equality
Discovering Disparity
A Political Practice of Sexual Difference
Refiguring Rights
CHAPTER FOUR
Feminists Make Judgments: Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's
Political Philosophy and the Afafirm tion of Freedom 125
Judgment and the "Problem of the New"
The Old Problem of Objectivity
Judging without a Concept
One Concept of Validity
A Political Concept of Validity
From World-Disclosure to World-Opening
"Being and thinking in my own identity where actualyl I am not"
Imagination and Freedom
Sensus Communis and the Practice of Freedom
CONCLUSION
Reframing the Freedom Question in Feminism 165
Feminism's Paradox of Founding
What a Political Claim Is
Feminism Is a World-Building Practice
Recovering Feminism's "Lost Treasure"
Notes 183
Index 231
PREFACE
� o R A Lo NG time I thought about this book as an attempt to find my
w.1y back to what once brought me to feminism: the radical demand for
'
womens political freedom, the right to be a participant in public affairs.
Ah hough feminism is composed of a wide range of practices-aesthetic,
,.,l·ial, economic, and cultural-the feminist challenge to the androcen­
lno;m of the public sphere and the constitution of alternative spaces of
I 1'l'l0dom is what captured and held my interest. Increasingly, however, I
Ii nmd myself both fascinated by but also ambivalent about developments
111 second-and third-wave feminism, especially the centrality accorded by
hoth waves to questions of identity and subjectivity. However important
1l wse questions seemed-and still seem-to me, I worried about the
Ira mework in which they were posed. I could not find in this framework
1l1c feminist demand for political freedom that so inspired me. Instead of
insistently claiming political freedom, it seemed, feminism was now
d"voted to overcoming the cultural constraints of normative masculinity
.ind femininity. As important as such a struggle is, I had trouble seeing
how it could possibly occur in the absence of the demand for freedom as
I understood it.
Concerned as I was about this reframing of freedom as freedom from
the constraints of subjectification, I also resisted the nostalgic longing for
early second-wave feminism that began to take hold in the 1990s in the
wake of the debates around identity politics. I strongly agreed with third­
wave critics who questioned the coherence of the category of women as
rhe subject of feminism, though I remained uneasy about the conse­
quences of such questioning for politics. Not least, I worried about acer­
tain tendency toward a renewed dogmatism on the part of feminists for
whom critiques of the category of women turned into a politically
x I PREFACE
destructive skepticism. At a certain point, it seemed that feminists were
talking past one another, quarreling about something that was in any case
an accomplished fact and hardly the result of anyone's deliberate choice.
The view that the collapse of women as a unified category was the fault
of "poststructuralist" feminist theorists and to a lesser extent "women of
color" struck me as an attempt to kill the message by killing the messen­
ger. It also seemed like a troubling displacement of feminist politics itself.
If we no longer speak unthinkingly of women as a group with com­
mon interests based on a common identity, surely that is not attributable
solely nor even primarily to the considerable critical energies of third­
wave thinkers like Judith Butler, Chantal Mouffe, or Joan Scott. The eco­
nomic and social developments of late capitalism (for example, the
breakup of the labor movement, globalization, and the homework econ­
omy) have resulted in exceedingly complex stratifications among women
nationally and internationally which cannot be grasped solely in terms of
gender relations. More to the point, the breakup of women as a coherent
group is attributable to feminism itself: feminism is a political movement
that has striven to unite women in a struggle for freedom largely by refut­
ing the naturalized femininity on which the illusion of a given, common
identity of women is based. Rather than willfully destroy the category of
women, then, thinkers like Butler, Mouffe, and Scott tried to clarify-in
deeply critical and non-nostalgic terms-the political consequences of its
historical loss for the future of feminism.
Trying to understand the pathos of the category of women debates, I
began to think it might be symptomatic of the epistemological framework
within which most second- and even third-wave feminisms were articu­
lated. As strange as it seemed to blame poststructuralists for the loss of
something that-insofar as we can speak of a loss-was more the prod­
uct of history and politics than of nihilistic scholarship, it seemed even
stranger to think that the future of feminism, as a political movement,
could possibly hang on the status of an analytic category of feminist the­
ory. Apart from the fact that few feminist activists understand theory as
a guide for praxis-save in some very loose sense-it seemed important
to move out of the details of "the subject of feminism" debates and ques­
tion their underlying assumption: What could be made of the idea that
any claim to speak in the name of women must function like a rule under
which to subsume particulars, lest it have no political significance at all?
Was there not perhaps some guidance to be had for feminism in this
moment from nonfeminists who had thought about the relation of poli­
tics and freedom to rules and their application?
PREFACE I xi
These thoughts and questions led me back to the thought of Hannah
1\rl·ndt, who had nothing to say about feminism, but a lot to say about
1 lw loss of traditional categories of thought for making sense of political
11·.1lity-the very sort of loss, it seemed to me, represented by the crisis of
1 Ill' category of women, a loss bemoaned by second-wave feminists and
11ltt·n scripted as a theft for which third wavers were made responsible. In
A rl·ndt's view, the break in tradition, already begun with the scientific rev-
11l 11tion in the seventeenth century, culminated with the political catas-
1 rophes of the twentieth. It is not only pointless but dangerous to try to
tl'rnver categories of thought that no longer resonate within our current
p11litical and historical context, Arendt held. Unfortunately, as she also
n·rngnized, just because a tradition has come to an end, traditional coo­
l 1·pts have not lost their power over us. On the contrary, they can become
l'ven more tyrannical, for a confused moral and political orientation can
,,·cm more appealing than no orientation at all.
As I reflected on the loss of women as a category of traditional polit­
Ka I theory and feminist political thought, Arendt's remarks on the break
111 tradition took on special significance. Writing this preface in 2004, I
a rn struck by the strange compromise we feminists have reached on mat­
t crs that once called forth a fairly militant articulation of oppositional
political stakes. The pathos is no longer there, but neither is any clear
sense of how to theorize or act politically without the inherited categories
of feminist thought. We nod to the importance of acknowledging differ­
l'rtCe among women, yet we persistently return to the idea that feminism
demands a unified subject. Alternatively, we vigorously refuse such a sub­
ject, but are at a loss about how to say or claim anything beyond the par­
ticular case.
This book cannot resolve all the puzzles it describes. But perhaps it
can help us think them through by clarifying how we got where we are
and how we might think differently about political freedom, political
claims, and the political role of feminist theory. "Our inheritance was left
to us by no testament," says Arendt, citing Rene Char. What if we took
that opaque aphorism as a challenge to welcome, rather than bemoan, the
irreversible break in tradition that characterizes politics in late modernity,
including feminism? In that spirit of possibility, I present my reflections.